Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has announced he will begin the new Congress today by violating Senate rules and forcing through a set of procedural changes that will undermine Senate conservatives' ability to influence legislation. But the "Reid Plan" will have its most dramatic impact on presidential nominations, especially for the Supreme Court.

The Senate is a unique legislative body that protects the rights of individual senators both to debate and to amend. These rights are valued so highly that it takes a supermajority -- today, 60 votes -- to deny fellow senators those rights. This higher vote threshold and the prospect of extended debate encourage deliberation, compromise and moderation.

Many Senate liberals want to gut this long-standing protection for minorities. Buried in the Reid Plan is a new rule, the "standing filibuster requirement," that will allow a partisan majority to shut off deliberation and pass legislation by a bare majority. Disguised as a debate-promoting measure, this new plan is actually just a mechanism to eliminate the higher vote threshold that has long been required to proceed to final passage of bills and nominations.

This spells the effective end to minority rights in the Senate. Today's 60-vote bar to end debate will be gone, and the Senate will be transformed into President Obama's rubber stamp.

You would think Harry would be smart enough to realize that he has seven democrat senators from Red states that are in serious danger of losing in 2014, and once the filibuster is gone, it’s gone...for future senates where democrats are the minority as well...

If this is passed, will the Republicans have the courage to then demand the reading of every single bill and reject the use of unanimous consent and require a recorded vote on every single action of the Senate? Essentially grind the Senate to a complete halt if the they can't use the filibuster.

8
posted on 01/03/2013 1:01:08 PM PST
by KarlInOhio
(Choose one: the yellow and black flag of the Tea Party or the white flag of the Republican Party.)

Ried is just a “useful idiot” for Obama. This is all part of Obama’s agenda to “BURY THE CONSTITUTION” -— as it is reportedly stated, that he told Putin, in spite of Putin’s own warnings about Obama’s agenda....

Wait where are the “Concerned” Senators? Where is the Media outrage....What No gang of 14? Sen. Grahamnesty is fine with Democrats ending the filibuster?? Oh that’s right the Selective Outrage only happens when Republicans are in charge. The RINO’s in Washington are fine being the permanant minority in Congress as long as the Dems are their “Friends”......

Boehner needs to come out and tell Reid that if he does do this, the House will send the Defense and Social Security budgets and appropriations bills to the Senate and that will be all of the government that will be funded until his tyranny is reversed.

Each body, House and Senate, write their own rules and seat their own members. Just after the Civil War, the Republican congress actually *refused* to seat many Democrats, and they could do that. So the SCOTUS could not stop Reid from doing this.

The only thing the Republicans can do is threaten the Democrats that if Reid does this, when the senate goes Republican in the future, the Republicans will give the Democrats the same disdain, and there will be at least two years when the Democrats cannot extensively road block *anything* the Republicans wish to do.

And that could spell the end of a vast amount of what the Democrats want.

Bottom line: this is brinksmanship. Mutually Assured Destruction at two year intervals, but only if the Democrats want it. If they reject it, the balance of power continues. But if they embrace it, the Republicans will embrace it too, and *everything* the Democrats have built over the last hundred years may be forfeit.

This could mean the end of the New Deal. The end of the Great Society welfare state. Slashing the size of the federal government by 50% or more, and throwing countless Democrat bureaucrats out of work.

The House can IMPEACH for any reason they wish, the term high crimes and misdemeanors means WHATEVER CONGRESS deems it to be, furthermore Congress has the Absolute Right to LIMIT WHAT the SUPREME COURT has Jurisdiction over, Read The Constitution.

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